Good News is good in light of , and “sounds good” because of , the bad. The bad has brought us to believe that this is “the way things are” and “meant to be”. The Good News arrives as an announcement that “the way things are” is something else. It’s not Caesar, but the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Caesar is not the status quo, but God’s telos (end or purpose toward which it moves) is.

An “Earth-Honoring Faith”* is what God’s blueprint proclaims. It works against the inequitable use of resources such that the wealthy dont have more of the stuff of life (and I’m not talking about the “stuff” that people amass and consume, but the “stuff” which enables life).

And the quintessential story of inequitable distribution (or extraction and consumption) is the story of the “homo colossus”; of the Overshoot authored by technical, industrial humanity. To “reveal” or “uncover” this reality is to start with apocalypse (which is to reveal or uncover) and let that uncovering ; that expose, bring forth the Good News: that the Earth is God’s good creation and the setting and source for all that God has brought forth, in which “we live, and move, and have our being”. So the Revelation that our faith is an Earth-Honoring Faith, is a proclamation of the Good News.

* I took that from the title of Larry Rasmussen’s book “Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key” (and I’m presently starting to read his earlier work almost 20 years ago, Eath-Community, Earth Ethics, which has sounded a theme which has brought about my conclusion here that Earth-Honoring Faith IS the Good News for today. If we don’t heed that, it’s going to be nothing but bad news.